Grieving Taiwanese actress Leanne Liu (劉雪華) is angrily hitting back at rumors of marital discord after her husband’s fatal fall from their third-floor Shanghai apartment.
After Taiwanese screenwriter Teng Yu-kun’s (鄧育昆) death on Monday, media reports circulated that the couple had recently argued about Liu’s workload. Teng was supposedly upset that his wife’s filming schedule kept her away and begged her to reduce her workload. Other reports stated that Teng suffered from depression and jumped impulsively in front of his wife after a fight.
Our sister newspaper the Liberty Times (自由時報) reported that Teng’s efforts to seek help were dismissed by a counselor who told him, “You can eat, you can sleep, you are physically healthy, so how can you have depression?”
Photo: Taipei Times
In response to the reports, Liu issued a statement dismissing the rumors of suicide. “As a matter of fact, I wish we had fought, because then I wouldn’t have gone to bed or slept so deeply that I had no idea what happened to him,” Liu told the media.
Liu’s friend Lin Mei-se (林美璱) wrote on her blog that Liu discovered her husband was not in bed when she woke up in the middle of the night. After seeing a “chaotic scene” on the balcony, including one of Teng’s slippers caught on their satellite dish, Liu called her friends for help before finding out that her husband had fallen to his death. She rushed to his body, but was held back by police officers.
Lin angrily dismissed rumors that Teng had jumped. “If he had really wanted to kill himself, he would have written 10,000 words” in a suicide note, Lin said.
Teng’s oldest son from a previous marriage, Teng Tien-hsing (鄧天星), rushed from Taipei to Shanghai after being informed of his father’s death. He also told the press that he was sure his father’s death was an accident. “The angle he fell was head first, he must have been fixing the satellite TV antenna when he slipped,” said Teng junior. Liu’s manager Shih Ya-chun (施亞娟) said on her blog that the satellite dish had been a source of continued annoyance for Teng and he had filed numerous complaints with his cable company.
Liu and Teng married in 1999 after meeting while both were working on the movie Stupid Child (笨小孩). In a blog entry, Lin lamented that her friend Liu had only recently endured the death of her father and was still grieving. The sudden loss of her husband has Liu on the verge of an emotional collapse, Lin wrote. Pop Stop offers our deepest condolences.
In relatively lighter news, the meltdown of Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝) and Nicholas Tse’s (謝霆鋒) marriage is entering yet another phase, much to the media’s joy. This time the couple appears to be using gossip rags to stoke the fires of what promises to be an ugly custody war. After “paparazzi” photos of Tse playing with son Lucas in a Macau hotel were released, he was accused of pandering to his fans in an effort to portray himself as a good father despite his wife’s claims that Tse has been frequently absent from their lives as he works.
The Apple Daily (蘋果日報) reported that the Cheung camp fired back by leaking a video of the actress and pop star happily taking part in Lucas’ school Christmas celebrations. In response, Tse hastened back to Hong Kong from filming in Malaysia. “This fight is turning white hot,” the Apple Daily gleefully announced.
According to the newspaper, Tse finally got fed up with his wife after she told him to “stop pretending to be a good husband and good father” and is now determined to not only get a divorce, but also fight for custody of the couple’s two small sons. If he does win custody, he will probably ask his mother Deborah Lee (狄波拉) to help him raise the children, which will no doubt make Cheung furious, as Pop Stop readers will know that she’s reportedly locked horns with her mother-in-law before over financial matters.
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